What is a groove?

Get out of the rut

We live under a barrage of delicious food. Our bodies reject dieting by storing more fat each and every time we go on a diet. And our brain responds to every thought about eating with an instinctive lust that demands to be satisfied immediately. It's a perfect storm that crushes any diet we've ever been on. We're stuck in a rut.

To fight the otherwise inevitable collapse takes a lot more than just well-thought-out intentions. Diet plans and will-power count for nothing. A great Prussian General once said that "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." Mike Tyson put it another way: "Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth."

Get into the Groove

What we need to do is to make our diet as instinctive as our lust for food. We need to help to re-direct our urges, we need to relearn our instincts, we need to tame our Amy Brain.

How much do you think about how you tie your shoelaces? Not much, I would guess, it's become instinctive. Just like a car passenger tries to stamp on the brakes if a ball rolls out into the road. Instincts aren't just things we are born with, we can learn them too. And we need to learn new instincts about eating.

Grooves... they're instinctive behaviour

That's what GROOVES are

Grooves are the little paths that help our brains learn new instincts. Grooves are the equivalent of learning to drive the car. They are little ways of behaving, or things to follow that are easy to learn, and soon become second nature. And when we add a bunch of them together we get into a whole new groove about eating altogether - that's when you find that you're in the Diet Groove.

Once you're in the groove, just follow.

The grooves are designed to help our instincts deal with the plentiful Traybake environment that we live in. They help us diet in a way that our body understands. And they help our brains to accept that its instincts aren't always the best for our waistline.

There are big grooves that are fundamentally important, and there are smaller grooves that just help things along a bit. I recommend that you follow them all.

Some might seem counter intuitive, but that's no bad thing. We can't just go on doing what diets have told us to do because they ignore the real issues. They tell us to resist temptation, control our eating, eat in moderation, and follow a plan. It doesn't work. It gets sabotaged.

Instead we have to factor in the real challenges. Behavioural research can help us do this. We can avoid temptation instead of just resisting it. We can even give in to temptation if we know how to contain it. We can eat without restraint if we eat the right way, and we can navigate between the profiteroles, the donuts and the muffins without a plan, as long as we act on the decisions we make.

We've got to diet differently if we are going to change fifty years of failure.